The Swedish noir crime TV series "Modus" is terrifying - but for all the wrong reasons

The eight-part Scandi-noir gloomfest Modus, which is mid-way through its Saturday-night run on BBC4, is the most successful Swedish-made series to be shown on Swedish TV for 25 years. I have no idea why - I bailed out after three episodes. It's awful. Not because the directing or the acting are bad (which they are), or because it's too slow (which it is), or because the script is dull and confusing (and how), but because - as I remarked to my wife during the second episode last week - "Aren't there any normal people left in Sweden?" (My language may have been slightly more colourful than that.)

The next day, without any prompting from me, I received an email from someone who had evidently found themselves asking the same question (Krister Henriksen, by the way, is the actor who played Wallander in the long-running Swedish TV adaptation of Henning Mankel's detective novels, and yes, he does have Alzheimer's in Modus, just as he did in Wallander):

Watched "Modus" tonight. None of the characters seem to be vaguely normal, but all seem to have modern affflictions. Krister Henrikson is married to a blond bishop, but they have two grandchildren who are obviously 100% black [?]. Henriksen seems to have dementia. The sister of the leading lady is seen marrying an American black. We also have a "married" homosexual couple and a lesbian one for good measure. There is an autistic teenager with titanic lips and Henriksen's son is obviously a woman with a moustache...The only normal person is the serial killer. 

I have, unfortunately, had to leave out the funniest line for reasons that would be obvious if I quoted it - but you get the gist. It is an accurate summary. An elderly female bishop is killed late one night on the way from her home to her church (where she oversees gender-neutral weddings, natch). We don't know why she left her house at that time of night, or who she might have been going to meet. Immediately following her brutal murder, I did utter the words, "Oh God, she's not another lesbian, is she?" It seems she might very well have been (a lesbian TV chef has already been murdered).

"Obey, conservative Christian monsters!"

From what I managed to gather from the first three episodes, there's a fanatical American Christian on the rampage in Stockholm, offing members of the LGBT community. He's being directed via the internet by a congregation of American bible-bashers back in Nutjobsville. There's someone else sending hate-mail to LGBT folk, but I haven't figured out who he is. The (presumably) autistic teenage daughter of the main character - a female criminal psychologist who bucks the trend by being heterosexual - witnessed a lesbian being murdered in a hotel stairwell, so the American Christian serial killer keeps turning up and menacing her in public, threatening to kill her mother if she tells anyone what she saw. The girl usually starts screaming when upset, but, for some odd reason, doesn't utter a sound when the serial killer threatens to kill her mother, which doesn't make much sense. There's a male gay married couple, who keep holding hands and kissing. One of them was involved with a gay artist, who's also been killed. They're having a baby via a lesbian couple (it's complicated). And, as my correspondent suggested, there are several blacks involved, but not in a bad way, obviously.

What's truly strange and disturbing about all this is that - as with so much television drama these days - it appears to have been produced in a parallel universe where the majority of Swedes are gay or lesbian, and where they're more in danger of attack from American Christian fundamentalists or fellow-white Swedes than they are from the large number of young male followers of the world's most homophobic religion who they've allowed into their country in recent years, and who are responsible for turning Sweden into the rape capital of Europe. (Swedish officials are such craven dhimmis that they have a habit of blaming the young Swedish rape victims rather than the bestial perpetrators - presumably because blaming Muslims would be culturally insensitive. Who knows what goes on in the warped heads of leftist compassion-mongers?) The only Muslim (so far) is the sidekick of the priapic police detective who has a dead daughter (because they all do these days) and who is trying to get into the pants of the criminal psychologist lady with the autistic daughter, who's separated from her useless, wet, thick husband.  The Muslim cop also has a daughter on the autism spectrum.

This is propaganda, pure and simple. It is leftist, cultural Marxist propaganda produced by fanatical fundamentalist members of the Church of Liberalism, and they are, in their smug, undermining, enervating, insidious way, as nutty and dangerous as any Jihadist fruit-loop - and far, far nuttier and more dangerous than any number of Christian holy-rollers, be they Shakers, Seventh Day Adventists, Jehova's Witnesses, Mormons, Pentecostalists, Baptists and/or Evangelicals.

Modus reminded me strongly of another Swedish cop series featuring murderous anti-gay Christian terrorists: it was Beck, and I wrote about it here. The Swedish liberal-left seem to have major issues with religion - only it's the wrong religion.

Modus is based on a novel written by a former Norwegian government minister. God help us.